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Monday, October 13, 2014

First Home and Birth of a Baby

It
was winter in New Hampshire early in the year 1976 when we purchased
our first house. After
lots of searching, we found one
in the
town of Amherst, a picturesque New England town complete with village green
and white church. The
house
was just up the road from the town center. All
the
other
houses around us were very large and each had about 2 acres of land.
We only had 3/4 of an acre and on that tiny property were lots of trees including 76 white birch. We found out later from neighbors that our tiny house began as
one room, and later
had other
rooms
added as
they were needed.
In fact one of the rooms still had the small red cedar shingles along
one wall that had originally been the outside wall.

(our first house)

Even
though we moved in February we were blessed with good weather in
the form of a
warm spell which had melted most of the snow
making it easier to move. That
was short lived and the snow came back with a fury, covering our long
uphill driveway. One morning while eating breakfast and thinking about having to shovel it in order
for Steve to get the car out to
go to work,
we heard a noise outside. To our surprise, the former owner had come
with his snow plow and cleared the
driveway! He
did it several more times that year. We
were so thankful.

(posing for my dad -guess we've always been homesteaders at heart)

Our
first child, Sara,
was born in June of that same year. She
was very punctual, coming
right on her
due date, refuting
what we had been told about babies never coming on their due dates.
The problem is that my mom was in
an airplane on
her way to the Boston airport which was an hour away from us. We had to call our friends to pick her up, because Steve needed to be with me.
They had never met my mother and we couldn't get in touch with her to
let her know, because that was before cell phones. They left
to meet her armed only with a picture. Eventually they found each
other and made it to the hospital.

(Sara was 2 weeks old here)

(Steve holding Sara right after she was born.
The nurses had put a pink ribbon in her hair.)

Because
this was my first child, after the doctor checked me he went on to
see patients at another hospital. After a little while, we kept
telling the nurse that she needed to check me, but she assured us
that first babies always take a long time. Finally, I guess she got
tired of Steve bugging her so she came to check and was surprised
that it was time. She called the doctor and he barely got to the
hospital before Sara made her debut.

The
maternity ward was not very busy that day, so when my mother arrived
they let her come into the labor room with us. Then they let her
stand outside the delivery room to hear the first cry of her first
grandchild. After taking me to my room, they let her come in so
she could hold our beautiful daughter. Nowadays that's not a big
deal, but then it was very uncommon to allow anyone besides the
father. I wish I had a picture of my mother with Sara, but I was not
able to find any. Here is my dad with her when she was about two weeks old.

Shortly
before Sara was born we acquired a puppy that was found by friends when they saw him wandering by the highway. Because
we didn't know how old he was or where he came from we named him
Melchizedek and called him Mel for short. He was quite a character.
We couldn't leave him alone, because when we would come home he would
have gathered all the little throw rugs from each room and put them
in a pile in the living room. Sometimes he chewed on them, but that
was usually the extent of the damage. The day Sara was born was
another story entirely. Our neighbor had offered to keep him for us, but we didn't really have time to alert her and we thought he'd be fine.

Little did we know. Come back next Monday to find out what all that puppy did while we were at the hospital.